A Life Lived in Dreams
by DQRC
Summary: While Edward Masen is consumed by his own dreams, Bella Swan is haunted by those of others. Only together can they find a way out of their waking nightmare. AH, rated for dark themes & language. Originally written for TR Dancer in support stacie auction
1. Chapter 1

**WARNING:** This fanfiction features direct references to abuse which some readers may find distressing. _**PLEASE READ WITH CAUTION.**_

**A/N:** This story was written to a prompt given by TR Dancer, as part of the Support Stacie auction. TR Dancer kindly agreed to let me share it with you.

The epigraphs below are from _Wuthering Heights_ by Emily Brontef and the song _Undisclosed Desires _by Muse, respectively.

* * *

_I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind._

* * *

_I want to reconcile the violence in your heart  
I want to recognize your beauty is not just a mask  
I want to exorcise the demons from your past_

_

* * *

_

**A Life in Dreams **

When Bella Swan was twelve years old, she stopped going to slumber parties. It was a Saturday afternoon and she had just returned from a night spent at Anna Baker's, a girl in her class who'd thrown a karaoke-centric, sugar-infused party to celebrate her 13th birthday. No less than fifteen girls had been invited, and they'd all been instructed to wear something 'pink and sparkly'. Bella, not owning such an item, had unwillingly borrowed a bracelet from her mother, which she'd promptly discarded minutes after stepping over Anna's threshold.

Bella sauntered into the light-filled kitchen of her house in Arizona, where her mother was busy cleaning.

"Hello, sweetheart," Renee said, her hands decked in sunny polka dot rubber gloves as she sprayed sanitizer all over the surfaces. "Have you only just got back?"

"I went to the library," Bella said, opening the fridge and helping herself to a bottle of coke. She uncapped it and relished the soft hissing sound it made, watching as the bubbles surged up, threatening to overflow. At the critical moment she took a sip, preventing it from spilling onto the newly sanitized faux marble surface. Then, drink in hand, Bella settled down on a stool in prime position to watch her mother.

"How was the party?" Renee asked absentmindedly. She wasn't really listening for an answer; she was focused on removing a rather tough looking stain from the draining board.

"It was okay," Bella replied, sipping her soda. "I don't really like Anna that much. She made us watch while she opened all her presents, and then cried when she didn't get the lipgloss she wanted."

"Sounds lovely," Renee murmured, clearly not listening to a word. Her hand was moving back and forth, back and forth over the stainless steel, the cloth making an annoying squeaking sound. Bella watched her, and decided that this was the moment to drop her bombshell.

"Which is why I don't think I'm going to go to any more slumber parties," she said, waiting to see if her mother had heard. Judging by the way she turned round and caught Bella's gaze, she had- albeit only the last part. Bella internally wondered at the power of Renee's ability to hear selectively.

"What did you say, darling?" she asked, pulling off her gloves and dumping them in the sink with a flourish-I've had enough of cleaning today- "Something about parties?"

Bella looked carefully at her mother's face, wondering how this would be received. "I said I don't want to go to them any more." As predicted, her mother's expression became stricken.

"You don't want to?" she asked, confused. "Why on earth not?"

Bella opened her mouth, trying to come up with an explanation… and then closed it again, when she realised that she didn't really have one. Not one she could tell Renee, anyway, and the truth definitely did_ not_ come under that category. However, even with that aside, Bella doubted that she would be able to find an excuse that her mother would deem acceptable, because Renee Dwyer was, and always had been, a consummate socialite. As a child, she was continually out for play-dates; as a teenager, kids queued up to sit with her at lunchtime and boys itched with the chance to ask her to dances; at college she been elected student president in just a _year_. Renee loved people; she lived and breathed for communication. Gossip was her currency and parties her solace. It was perfect that her new husband, Phil, was a semi-successful baseball player, because his career brought her even more ways to network. Therefore Bella knew that no matter what excuse she came up with, no matter what story she spun, it would never satisfy her mother.

It's not like they'd ever seen eye to eye anyway. How ever much Renee loved her daughter – and she did love her - she could never quite understand her. Bella was so much more like her father, Renee decided. She preferred books to people; she could go days without watching television; she'd never expressed any interest in clothes, or fashion, or make up. She loved _Vanity Fair_… but the novel, not it's flashier, trashier counterpart. So, really, Renee wasn't as surprised as she was dismayed by Bella's announcement that she was foregoing the number one form of pre-teen socialisation. If there was one thing Renee could count on her daughter to do, it was behave in the exact opposite to how she had done as a child.

"I don't know, Mom," Bella said, her eyes downcast, fiddling with the peeling rubber of her sneakers. Renee hated it when she wore those things. She'd lost track of how many times she ordered her to bin them. "They're just not fun anymore." She paused, looking up and staring straight into Renee's eyes. "I'm sorry, I really am."

And they both knew that she was talking about much more than a stupid slumber party.

* * *

Much later, Bella sat on her bed, staring blankly into the darkness. It was past midnight, she knew, but beyond that she had no idea of the exact time. The street outside was quiet, except for the occasional murmur of a passing car at the crossroads ten blocks down. Renee and Phil were asleep. But, as usual, Bella didn't even try to close her eyes. There was no point. She was waiting for the moment she knew had to come.

She suddenly felt a pulling sensation at the back of her eyes, as though they were being sucked backwards into her skull. Her surroundings completely disappeared, and a deafening roaring sound filled her ears, her pulse going into hyper-drive. Then, just as the sound and heat of the blood pounding through her heart were about to become unbearable, everything stopped. A completely pure silence hit Bella with the force of a car crashing into a wall. And then the images began to invade her mind.

_Oh – there – yes, there –yes, yes..._

_Hands interlocking in the darkness, lips on heated skin, and then she's falling, falling into oblivion... _

And then it was gone, and Bella was back where she had begun - alone in the darkness of her room. Only now she was paralysed by the familiar, yet still sickening, feelings of nausea and horror that represented the aftershock. There were tears, too, on her cheeks. That was common, but it was worse some nights. _Nights like this_.

Even if Bella lived to be a hundred, she would never get used to seeing her mother have sex with her stepfather in her dreams.

* * *

Bella couldn't pinpoint when it had started. She knew she hadn't always been able to see into people's dreams – because that was, Bella decided, the only explanation of what was happening to her. There was noway she was coming up with this stuff on her own - she was only _twelve_ - but she couldn't remember exactly when it had all started. It wasn't like she went to bed one night and all of a sudden, BAM, she was watching a second grade porno, courtesy of Renee Dwyer. No, this power – this ability that Bella neither understood nor controlled – had developed slowly. As the years went by, her dreams had become stranger, sometimes containing people she'd never met or places she'd never been. Bella would usually see everything through the other person's eyes, but sometimes she was an outside observer. By the time she was eleven and a half – about eight months before Anna's sleep over – Bella had realised that her dreams were no longer 'hers'. They were stolen, spied-on fragments of other people's.

There was no constant to the dreams. Sometimes they lasted hours, sometimes only a couple of seconds. They could be sexual – and those were the ones that Bella grew to dread with a cold, sick terror – but more often than not they were just normal, boring dreams. Her mother's tended to be about parties or engagements with her friends, although when she was stressed they veered towards endless shopping lists and phones ringing continuously off the hook. Phil's were generally about him winning the Superbowl in some capacity, but he occasionally had nightmares which featured him being chased or back in a ninth grade chemistry lesson. Sometimes Bella wouldn't see their dreams at all, instead finding herself thrust into the sleeping minds of neighbours, or even people further afield. Once she had even been her seventh grade English teacher, Mrs Pickles. She lived on the other side of town.

There was no method to _when _she saw them, either. Despite them mainly coming at night – although they had been known to invade her mind randomly during the day – Bella had no way of knowing when the dreams would come to her. Sometimes she made it all the way through the night without having a single vision. Those nights were like gold dust to Bella; they were the only times she could sleep uninterrupted. Other nights, the dreams would assault her mind in a barrage of never-ending images, foreign thoughts and voices raining down on her like a sea of mental bullets.

Bella couldn't tell anyone about the dreams. Even at the age of twelve, she knew that her ability, whatever it was, was most definitely 'not normal'. People would think she was insane. Her _mom _would think she was insane. Bella didn't want to do anything to further damage their already strained relationship and, somehow, she knew that telling the truth would definitely come under that category. She could imagine the conversation.

_Yeah, so you know how I said I don't like slumber parties? Well, the truth is that I can actually see into other peoples dreams and I'm finding it really traumatic, as a matter of fact, no I'm not crazy, and oh did I mention that I know that when you and Phil go to bed you do more than just sleep and it makes me want to throw up?_

Yes, Bella decided that it was altogether safer to keep her secret just that – secret. It was easier to suffer alone every night in the dark and the silence than to let anybody else in. Because if there was one thing she didn't want to do, it was give the rest of the world proof of what she already suspected they knew to be true – that Bella Swan was a freak.

So, the night of the day after Anna's sleep over, Bella silently wiped away her tears with shaking hands. The cool night air that crept through her open window brushed against her cheeks, soothing their burning heat, easing the remnants of shame and disgust that lingered in her still pounding heart.

She took a deep, shuddering, breath, sank back against her covers and rolled onto her side. Then, with effort, she closed her eyes, waiting, in vain, for dreams of her own making to come.

Three rooms away, Phil Dwyer dreamt he hit a home run.

* * *

As Bella aged, she developed coping strategies. The 'no-slumber parties rule was to be the first of a long line of tactics adopted to try and minimise the impact of her power. She avoided cinemas, theatres, or anywhere else that involved being around large groups of people in the dark. She never drove after 6pm and took odd routes around school and other public buildings to make sure she wouldn't come into contact with the apparently ubiquitous sleeping security guard.

Despite her best efforts, however, Bella couldn't plan for every eventuality. She still had the visions on a regular basis – mostly when she was alone, at night, but occasionally it was worse. A couple of times she had been caught off guard by a classmate snoozing in the back of the room, and had had to fight to stop herself from being noticed as she blacked out and was overtaken by the familiar roaring noise that accompanied the dreams.

Bella usually managed this – barely – but there had been that one horrible time in tenth grade Spanish when she had regained consciousness to find herself lying on the floor of the classroom, being scrutinised by onlookers. Despite her protests that she had simply fainted from the heat of the stuffy classroom, Bella had still found herself rushed to the nurse and her mother had been called. Renee had driven over from work in the middle of the day to pick her up in a flurry of panic and, ever the over-dramatic, had diagnosed her with epilepsy on the spot. It wasn't until Bella had agreed, under duress, to visit the doctor and been given a clear bill of health that Renee finally calmed enough to drive them both home.

Apart from that one, horrible day, however, Bella's time at secondary school had passed generally uneventfully. By the time she was seventeen, she'd perfected the art of blending into the background. Bella didn't have friends. She never tried to talk to people and, though polite, she never encouraged anybody else's attempts to get to know her. In the eyes of her classmates, she was aloof, distant, cold.

Predictably, it broke Renee's heart. As Bella drifted through her teenage years and it became even more apparent that she would never show an interest in any of the things her mother held so dear – fashion, entertaining, socialising – the gap between them became even greater.

"Why don't you just go _out_?" Renee exclaimed, one Saturday night in December, at the end of Bella's first term of Senior year. Bella was eating cereal at the kitchen table, her head buried in a book.

"Excuse me?" She looked up in surprise at her mother's words; she hadn't noticed her presence.

Renee was standing in the doorway, her eyes hard and critical. "You heard me. It's a Saturday; school's just let out for Christmas. All the other kids your age are out having fun, but you're sitting here reading _Jane Eyre_," her face grimaced at the title, "for the fifth time in so many weeks. It's not _healthy_, Bella."

Bella didn't answer. Underneath her frustration and disappointment, Renee did look concerned. The emotion was there, buried deep under the perfect face of make-up and impeccable clothes. She was worried about her. Worried about how little her daughter was living.

"I'm fine, Mom," Bella said. It was the same sentence she always churned out whenever Renee started this argument.

"You are _NOT _fine!" she cried, her voice getting slightly higher, "You might think it's normal to live like this, without any real contact with people, but it's downright _weird_ and –" Renee broke off her tirade. Bella had suddenly got up from her seat and was walking through the other door into the hallway, heading for the stairs. Her face was white and her hands were shaking, but Renee didn't notice. "You come right back here!" Renee shouted, but Bella kept going, her head down and face forced into an impassive expression. Her breathing had quickened and her hands were trembling. Renee's shouts followed her as she mounted the first step...

"You've got no consideration for how I feel -,"

_second step, third_

Bella could feel her eyes beginning to roll in their sockets

"- Or how your behaviour affects mine and Phil's lives -"

_sixth, seventh, _

The roaring had started in her ears, but it wasn't loud enough to block out her mother's ranting below

"– how embarrassing it is when my friends tell me about how popular their children are -"

_last step and on to the landing, _

Bella turned right towards her bedroom. The darkness was descending and had to fumble her way, almost tripping on the rug

"– I didn't sign up for this when I applied for custody, I didn't think I'd be living with a _robot_ -"

_nearly there, nearly safe_

Renee's shrieks were so loud now that they reverberated off of the walls of the hallway. Bella's throat was burning and in her mind she could see the blurry outline of pictures beginning to take shape

"– you make it so hard for anyone to love you, Bella. Do you think getting pregnant in college was how I planned my life? - "

_two more steps, just two more steps_

Bella dove blindly for the door, unable to prevent a gasp ripping from her throat as she felt her legs threaten to give way. She wrenched open the door and fell into her darkened room

"- Do you think I wanted it? Do you think I wanted this? -" Renee's voice broke and she began to sob.

On the floor above her, Bella's door slammed shut.

Across the road, while dozing in his chair, old Mr Bannerman began to dream of the day he had first learnt to ride a bike.

It was a nice dream.

But for Bella, it might as well have been a nightmare.

* * *

Needless to say, Bella wasn't happy.

She had alienated everybody at school; her own mother had admitted she was unwanted; the only time she was close to anybody was in their dreams.

She didn't naturally yearn to push people away – it was, like everything else in her life, a strategy. It was hard to form relationships with people when you knew their deepest, darkest desires. By the time she reached her teens, Bella had witnessed so many people's dreams that she was jaded. It didn't matter if the person was new – all people were fundamentally the same; their minds worked the same way, their mean thoughts and petty jealousies or spites were the same, their selfishness and egocentricity as uniform as if it was fresh from a mould. What was the point in talking to people? What was the point in getting to know the boy in maths, when she knew that the minute he fell asleep he would have the same lust-crazed, hormone fevered dreams as every other teenage boy in the world?

... Or at least that's what Bella told herself. Because pretending that all people were horrible made it easier to be alone.

Assuming they were identical would stop her from trying to reach out or make friends, and that was crucial, because if she got close to anyone, they would know her secret. And that would ruin everything.

At least, so Bella believed. So she told herself.

But then, she met _him_. And everything changed.

* * *

Thanks to Rachel for helping beta.

I won't lie to you - I think this story would work just as well as a piece of original fiction. Since writing it, I've toyed with the idea of trying to expand it into a full length original novel. I haven't got anywhere near that stage yet, but if I ever do then I _might _(emphasis on the conditional here) take it down. Until that happens (indeed if it ever does) enjoy, share and read away :)


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N - **Thanks to everybody who reviewed the last chapter, especially those sharp people who pointed out a couple of my glaring Briticisms. I've been back and edited them; hope there aren't any more in this chapt.

This is the chapter when everything starts to heat up. The warnings about **abuse and strong language **still apply - **PLEASE _read with caution_**.

**Chapter Song:**_ Vox _by Sarah Mclachlan

* * *

_In the desert of my dreams I saw you there_  
_And I'm walking towards the water steaming body cold and bare_  
_But your words cut loose the fire and you left my soul to bleed_  
_And the pain that's in your truth's deceiving me, has got me scared_

* * *

_Clammy fingers against a cheek – a whimper – darkness - sssh, Edward, it's just me – __**the rustle of sheets**__ – a pounding heart and no, please, no... _

Edward woke up gasping for breath, his entire body shaking. He was drenched in cold sweat and the covers of his bed were twisted tightly around his limbs, his chest heaving with sharp, panicked intakes of breath. He dragged himself up into a sitting position and looked wildly around the room, his pulse pounding in his throat. Through the dull half-light he could make out a bunch of cardboard boxes scattered across the dark carpeted floor and a pile of screwed up clothes draped across a cheap, fold-up desk chair. Then he groaned and sank back down, his head banging against the pillow as certain key facts cemented themselves in his mind.

He was in his new room, in Arizona. He was seventeen, not seven.

... And right now, he was supposed to be downstairs, helping his mother unpack. It was early evening on a Tuesday at the end of February and they'd just arrived at their new house. It was already dark outside. Edward shook his head and squinted his eyes shut before opening them again, shooting a disorientated glance at the room. He hadn't meant to fall asleep - he'd just been so tired after driving all day. Right on cue, Elizabeth's voice filtered up the stairs.

"Edward, can you give me a hand please?"

Edward ignored her at first. He stared at the white ceiling above him, trying (and failing) to forget the nightmare. It was the same one as always, yet this time it had been particularly vivid; it was the first time in months that he had been so disorientated on waking.

He hoped it wasn't a sign that the dreams were going to start getting worse again. He didn't think he could handle that.

Donwstairs, Elizabeth called him again. Unwillingly, Edward dragged himself out of bed. He loped across the room and out into the light of the corridor, shutting the door firmly behind him.

* * *

It was a Saturday morning in March and Bella was late for work. She had a job working at the local garden centre. It had only been her second choice when looking for work – the first had been as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool, which she'd assumed was one of the places she'd be least likely to encounter somebody sleeping. Unfortunately, her natural clumsiness and general physical ineptitude had led to her failing every single aspect of the not-that-rigorous entrance exam. So the garden centre it was. People tended not to fall asleep when shopping for plants. (The same could not, sadly, be said for a book shop, which had been her secret first choice).

Her shift started at 11:30 and usually she walked, but today she'd had difficulty getting out of the house in time, so she'd taken her truck. Last night had been an especially difficult night for sleep and Bella found herself having to slap herself at every traffic light just to keep awake.

As she passed through a junction, ignoring the beeps from the guys in the car directly across, Bella wryly contemplated what would happen if she fell asleep at work. She decided that she'd better stop to pick up some before she punched in.

_Is my purse still in my bag? _Bella thought to herself, absentmindedly indicating to turn left onto a residential street – a shortcut. _Or did I take it out last week? Will I have enough money for one coffee? _She glanced at the clock on the dashboard and pressed down a little bit harder on the gas. Better speed up a little if she wanted to get coffee and still be on time.

And then, suddenly, she began to shiver; she noticed that the roaring in her ears was more than just the normal noise of the car; everything went black. Bella felt the familiar uncomfortable sucking at the back of her eyes and her insides went cold with dread as she realised what was about to happen. She slammed her feet down on the brakes and swerved to the right, away from the path of any oncoming traffic...

* * *

_**BAM!**_

Edward bolted upright in his bed, shaken awake. He looked around his room, wondering what the hell had just happened. He had been in the middle of a standard nightmare and had been fighting to wake himself up, but something else had beaten him to it. He took deep breaths, trying to control his racing heartbeat. His hands were shaking and his mind was still gripped by the remnants of the dream. _A weight on his bed, whispers in silence, black eyes staring at him through the darkness, stars blinding him... _

Edward shook his head, angrily. He could feel the bottled up rage he always felt after a dream pulsing through his veins. He jumped to his feet and ripped back the curtains, in an attempt to throw some light on the room and the source of the noise which had woken him. As he did so, he threw a glance through his window – which hung wide open – at the front drive and road outside. And then he swore in disbelief.

A huge, old, rusty blue truck was beached up on the sidewalk outside his house, its nose thrust into the middle of the garden wall. There were pieces of broken brick and lumps of soil scattered all over, having clearly exploded from the point of collision. There was also smoke rolling out of the bonnet of the car, obscuring whoever was sitting in the driver's seat.

Edward swore again and grabbed a shirt, shoving it over his bare chest and sprinting outside.

* * *

When Bella finally came around, she was shaking all over. She felt cold and hot at the same time, her stomach was lurching, threatening to hurl, there was sweat on the back of her neck and spots in front of her vision.

_weight – whispers – eyes – sheets – stars – ssssshhh, Edward, it's just me..._

Bella gagged at the memory, and involuntarily threw up her hands to her mouth in attempt to stop herself from being sick. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, but the memory of the dream she just witnessed didn't fade – it stayed imprinted on her retinas as though burned there.

Bella had never experienced such a bad dream. It wasn't the events themselves that made it awful, although they were appalling, but the sheer _emotion _of it. Terror, and pain and guilt and hatred, all rolled into one seething, brooding nightmare which gripped and electrified the soul, poisoning its very core. She still felt shaky just at the very thought of it. _Poor Edward_, she thought, sickened. Whoever he was, wherever he was, she felt a great whoosh of sympathy and pity for him and his situation and his terrible nightmare.

Bella looked around at the car, taking stock of what had happened to her physical self, while her mental one had been so very preoccupied. In her attempts to prevent herself and the car from being hit by other cars in her moments of inertia, she'd managed to drive straight into the garden wall of one of the houses which lined the street. Her heart dropped slightly. Her insurance would probably cover the cost of the wall, but she'd still have to deal with the displeasure of the inhabitants of the house. Well, at least a wall was all that was damaged, Bella thought. It could have been _much _worse. She inwardly scolded herself at being foolish enough to think that she could drive at this time of the day. Of _course _it wasn't safe; of course someone somewhere would be sleeping.

Although there would have been no way of predicting such a paralyzing dream, Bella reminded herself. That had been something completely unprecedented.

She reached for the car door and opened it, gingerly stepping down from the driver's seat. Her shoulders and neck ached from the collision, but there didn't seem to be any real damage. The same could not be said, unfortunately, for the person's garden. Bella stepped carefully over the now practically destroyed primroses.

"HEY!"

She heard a shout from the direction of the house and her heart sank even lower. It sounded as though the owner of the garden was none too pleased about the damage she'd caused. She stepped around the hood, well away from the cloud of pungent grey smoke that was beginning to pour from the car's engine. She groaned: another thing to chalk up to the insurance.

"Hey, you!" came the voice from behind her, much closer now. Bella swivelled around. A boy in his late teens was storming towards her, his face the colour of thunder. "What the hell do you think you're – " he yelled, then suddenly stopped abruptly. It appeared as though the smoke had only just cleared sufficiently for him to see the identity of the driver. Bella guessed that her being female, roughly his age and more than six inches smaller than him had knocked some of the wind from his sails. She saw him glance from the truck back to her and understood his expression. He'd been expecting a big, bone-headed bruiser of a white van man – instead he'd got a petite brunette with a frown.

The surprise appeared to wear off pretty quickly, however, because in moments the boy was speaking again. He had regulated his tone somewhat, but it was still only a degree or two below shouting.

"What the hell happened?"

"I crashed," Bella said quickly, immediately deciding that her gender was to be her best weapon in this confrontation. She attempted to look helpless. "I'm _so _sorry, this cat ran into the road and I panicked, thinking I was going to hit it, so I swerved."

"You didn't think to brake instead?" He asked, unimpressed.

"I did," she replied, trying to appear sheepish, "but I moved the wheel instinctively." There was a silence, and Bella realised that her story was not going down well. "I really am sorry about the wall; I'll obviously pay to replace it."

The guy grunted. He looked at Bella, sizing her up. He seemed suspicious, although less angry than before. "You're not hurt, are you?" He asked, grudgingly. It didn't seem that he minded so much as he felt he should ask.

"No, I'm fine."

"Oh. Good."

They stood in silence for a couple of moments. Bella peered at him surreptitiously, taking in his appearance. He was very tall and slightly gangly, with long legs and impossibly messy dark brown hair. His eyes were a dark blue and were ringed with dark circles. His face – which could have possibly been handsome if given the chance – was currently contorted in a dark scowl. Bella was simultaneously curious and irritated at this guy's overwhelming hostility. It was almost as though he had _already _been angry before she'd showed up and was now trying to resist taking it out unnecessarily on her. She wondered if maybe he was just always like this.

And then everything suddenly lurched up three gears.

* * *

"Edward?" Edward was standing staring at the girl who had driven her truck into his wall – because of a _cat _– and trying to resist the urge to shout at her for being so stupid, when he heard his mom calling him.

"What?" He yelled back, glancing at the house.

"Where are you, sweetie? Are you in the yard?" Elizabeth walked out of the front door, clutching something in her hands. On spotting Edward, she looked relieved. "Oh good, _there_ you are," she chirped, coming over, "I need you to fix this. I was listening to the music and then suddenly it all stopped and I have no idea wh- WHAT happened to the wall!" She gasped, suddenly, the problematic iPod forgotten. She was gazing in bemused shock at the smoking car and crumbling wall.

Edward sighed.

"She crashed into it," he said, rather rudely, pointing at the girl... who he suddenly noticed was staring at him with a wide eyed expression bordering on horror. Elizabeth's eyebrow rose.

"You _did_?" She asked the girl, in an astonished tone that seemed to ask why anyone would want to do such a thing.

"By accident," the crasher explained, sending Edward one more dismayed glance, before launching off into the same excuse story she had already fed him, only this time for Elizabeth's benefit. Edward watched with a mixture of dry amusement and annoyance as Elizabeth listened to the tale, her reaction varying from the surprised to the horrified – at the thought of a cat almost being run over – and the disinterested at the girl's repeated assurance that she would pay to replace the wall.

"Oh, there's no need," she said offhandedly. "I hate the stupid thing anyway; I was going to ask somebody to get rid of it. I'd much prefer a fence."

The girl – whose name, it turned out, was Bella – affirmed that she had to do something to make up for the damage.

"I could sort out the flowers, at least," she said. "I'm pretty good at gardening; I work at a garden centre."

"_Do _you?" Elizabeth replied, her attention switching back from the iPod, suddenly interested again. She looked at Bella with vague concentration. "Actually, I could do with a gardener. How much do you charge?"

Bella looked confused. "Charge? I was volunteering, to make up for – "

Elizabeth cut her off, not caring about the details. "Well, whatever they pay you at this garden centre of yours, I'll match it. Come here on Sunday mornings. You can start tomorrow." And with that, she turned tail and wandered off, the iPod in her hand forgotten. Edward had a sneaking suspicion that she was headed straight for the kitchen and the half empty bottle of Cincinnati from the night before.

With a bitter smile, he turned to look at Bella. She was still staring at him.

"What?" he asked bluntly. He didn't like being stared at, especially not by random people who had just broken his wall and then witnessed an embarrassing display of his mother's flaky capriciousness, even if they were semi-attractive girls.

"Your name's... Edward?" She asked.

What a strange question. "Ye-es."

He waited for her to elaborate – to say something like: _'Oh, my dog's name is Edward'_ or something equally inane, but she didn't.

Instead, she blushed, inexplicably, and stared at her feet. "I... I'd better be going. I guess I'll see you tomorrow, then." she murmured. When she looked back up, Edward realised that her eyes looked pained to the brink of tears. He was dumbfounded. He had no idea what the hell was going on inside this girl's mind, other than his slight suspicion that she might actually be crazy.

He also had a slight but niggling urge to go and give her a hug. It pissed him off; Edward Masen didn't usually care about girls, or even notice them beyond their looks. _They _were the ones who fell head over heels for him.

Bella turned away from him and jumped up into the cabin of her car. It had stopped smoking by now, but Edward was certain it wouldn't start. However, to his upmost surprise, after some coaxing it came to life. Admittedly, it sounded more like a dying choke than a healthy roar, but the engine was definitely running all the same. He wanted to shout something out to her, like a warning to be careful, because that car really couldn't be that safe – and then he realised how weird and stupid that would sound, and kept quiet.

He watched as she backed out of the flower bed, back across the sidewalk and on to the road, turning so that she was soon chuntering out of sight.

Edward looked blankly at the space in the broken wall, wondering what had just happened.

Then he went inside, where he found his mother sitting at the kitchen table. She was smiling stupidly next to the now empty bottle of Cincinnati. Edward glanced at the clock on the wall; it was 11:55am.

He sighed. Another perfect Saturday.

* * *

**A/N: **I don't really have an update schedule - the fic is written (well, in it's non-full length novel fanfiction state) and I'm going to update every couple of days or so.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Song:** _Boulevard of Broken Dreams - _Greenday

* * *

_I walk a lonely road  
The only one that I have ever known  
Don't know where it goes  
But it's home to me and I walk alone_

* * *

Edward sometimes resented the sheer predictability of his life. There was nothing new about his situation – the story was standard talk show fare and the characters had already been immortalised in countless daytime soap operas. The flaky, self-absorbed mother with a penchant for self-destruction and her dark, angry son who gets high off his own hatred of the world and everyone in it were so familiar it was as though they had strolled right off the pages of a dime store paperback. Nor was there anything truly extraordinary about their choppy, shame saturated past and the secrets that festered in the corners of their life, infecting every glance and conversation like a disease.

And yet it wasn't fiction – it was Edward's life, and neither the lack of originality nor the knowledge that others had lived through the same experiences made it any easier to bear.

It certainly did not make his mother easier to forgive.

* * *

Here's the thing about Elizabeth Masen; she was not an especially bad person, but neither was she a very good one. She'd played averagely with the hand she'd been dealt which, admittedly, was never a particularly spectacular one to start with. She'd never wanted a son. Or any baby at all, to be more accurate.

Yet Elizabeth was anything but the downtrodden brand of white trash you'd usually associate with a life of alcoholism or despair. From that point of view, she'd actually been incredibly lucky. Disarmingly beautiful, she had grown up on her grandparents' vineyard in Southern California. Her parents had died in a fire in a nightclub when she was four – she'd been staying with Grandma and Grandpa at the time, and she never packed her bags to go home. Her family was classically wealthy and the compensation from the legal case surrounding her parents' death made them even more so. But money couldn't buy compassion or love. Old Mr and Mrs Masen were not particularly caring towards their granddaughter, seeing her as a mild irritation bent on messing up their perfect retirement. Elizabeth's only saving grace, in their eyes, was the way she looked – with her tumbling caramel locks and satin pink lips she was forever being summoned to the table at dinner parties, so that she could be showed off to her grandparents' equally wealthy, snobbish friends.

Imagine their horror, then, when Elizabeth fell pregnant five weeks before her nineteenth birthday. As if the shame of an unplanned, teenage pregnancy wasn't bad enough, the fact that Elizabeth couldn't be sure of the father and had no intentions of marrying one of the possibilities (or, to be more precise, couldn't persuade one to ask her) came as the final straw. Elizabeth's grandparents sent her away with a vast sum of money upon which she and her unborn child were supposed to survive for the next two decades.

For anyone else, it would have been enough. But not for Edward's mom. An inability to budget combined with a wilful desire to enjoy herself meant that by the time Edward was six, the money had already almost all disappeared.

A psychiatrist probably would have said that Elizabeth's lifestyle was an attempt to find the enjoyment and love she had never had as a child. For Edward, however, it meant only one thing: a constant stream of men parading through their house.

The kind of men who buzzed around an insecure, twentysomething year old single mother with an endless capacity to love and a seemingly bottomless wallet; the kind who wore cheap gold and stunk of cigarette smoke and expensive cologne; the kind that brought gas station flowers and small bags of white powder through the hallway that Edward used as a playroom.

Some might say that with those sorts of men – sometimes more than one at a time – constantly hanging around the house, it was inevitable that things progressed as they did.

But as it happened, that wasn't how it worked out. The man who changed Edward's life forever wasn't a greasy, gold-digging narcotics salesman. He was someone altogether more sinister.

* * *

When Bella realised that the angry teenage boy standing on the lawn three feet away from her was the same seven year old child from the dream that had made her crash her car, she experienced a whole host of emotions. The first was shock. The second was disbelief. Then she was filled with an aching, excruciating sadness which threatened to swallow her hole. She couldn't bear looking at him, she felt so awful when she thought back to the terror of his dream and the pain that he'd been through.

She also felt one more thing: an overwhelming, fundamental desire to help him, in any shape or form. Bella didn't know how she could possibly achieve this goal. He was a total stranger and a hostile one at that, yet she knew that there was no way she could experience a dream like his and move on from it without doing something. Maybe it was no coincidence that she'd been driving past as he'd had the dream, maybe it wasn't just chance which caused her to crash into his yard. Perhaps she was supposed to help him and find a way to lessen some of the pain which had saturated his dream and emanated from his very presence.

Maybe, just maybe, her power – this curse that had tried to ruin her life – would actually lead to some good.

The idea was irresistible.

Which was why, when Bella returned to do Edward mom's gardening the next day, she suggested subtly to Elizabeth that she might want to buy some new plants to replace the old ones. Elizabeth nodded vaguely, looking up from the television only to suggest that Edward came with Bella.

Edward glared the entire journey, and by the time they'd reached the garden center, Bella was beginning to wonder whether she'd made a really stupid decision, trying to get Edward on his own. Edward, for whatever reason, seemed to hate her.

* * *

Edward didn't hate Bella Swan, he just didn't understand her. There she was, some random girl who had crashed her car into their yard and then been employed to do the gardening by his mother on a stupid whim, and now all of a sudden he was supposed to give up his Sunday morning to accompany her to buy plants. _Plants_.

Like he didn't have better things to be doing. Edward might have only been living in Arizona for a couple of weeks, but he'd already made a couple of aquaintances at latest faceless, nameless high school he'd been dumped in. He didn't go out of his way to be friendly to people - in fact, one might say he actively avoided any meaningful social contact - but the sheer fact that he looked 'cool', with his chiselled features and athletic physique, had already earned him at least one party invitation. Not that Edward cared. He pretty much defined the word 'jaded' - other people held no real attraction for him. He'd decided long ago that people, as a rule, were not worth befriending. They'd inevitably just let you down.

However, even if he couldn't be bothered to consort with the shallow masses and play at the game that was the teenage social scene, he could think of a thousand and one things that were more appealing than pretending to care about horticulture with a girl he had no intention of knowing.

And she kept shooting him weird looks, as though she was trying to read his mind or some such crazy shit. He knew girls really liked to express their feelings and stuff, but he was pretty sure that they were in far too early stages of their acquaintance for him to be expected to share anything with Bella. And anyway, if most girls got even a glimpse of the demons which controlled his mind, they'd be running as fast as they could in the other direction.

These thoughts grumbled on in Edward's head as he parked the car and slouched out, closing the door. He wanted to slam it, to work out some of his frustration, but he liked his ride too much for that kind of abuse. So instead he satisfied himself with jerking the cart out of its bay with a bit of unnecessary force, and pushing it along in silent sullenness as Bella attempted to make things a bit friendlier.

"So, I thought perhaps we could go look at the shrubs first, then move on to the plants for bedding. I reckon some different types of flowers would really brighten up the garden. What do you think?"

Edward grunted noncommittally. He knew he was being an ass, but he couldn't bring himself to act interested. One, he didn't care about plants and, two, he didn't know why Bella was being nice to him but suspected it probably was only because of his looks and, three, he didn't like the way that he liked that she was being nice to him, because she was totally average-looking and kind of weird therefore there was no reason for him to like her in that way at all. But still he felt this strange electricity every time she came too close to him, as though the air around her was actually charged. It made his skin prickle in a way that wasn't at all unpleasant.

And it confused Edward. So he tried to walk further apart from her and not look at her directly if he could.

Bella seemed to pick up on the vibes he was sending out, because she didn't speak to him very much at all after that. They walked around the center and bought the plants – Bella insisted on paying for almost all of them herself – in relative silence.

Until, finally, they were standing in the car park and Edward was loading the plants they'd bought into the car and Bella was trying to help and Edward – more harshly than he'd intended – told her to just get out of the way so he could do it faster. Bella stared at him with a shocked, hurt expression and then lowered her eyes.

"I wish you'd just let me do this," she finally replied, "I want to help you." She looked up at Edward, a tinge of hope in her gaze.

_Noone can help me._ "Huh. So you're not just some stupid girl that crashed into my wall and needs a date to her best friend's 18th?"

Sometimes Edward Masen could be a total bastard. This particular moment was one of those times.

Bella looked visibly stricken for a couple of seconds; a flush rose to her cheeks and she stammered slightly.

"I'm – I'm different."

"Are you?" Edward raised an eyebrow. There was skepticism on his face. Inwardly, he felt guilty for giving such a clearly sweet girl such an awful time. He was a terrible person. But somehow, he couldn't stop. The more he realised how nice she was and how much he liked her, the more he wanted to hurt her. A part of him couldn't bear the thought of actually allowing himself to speak to something so pure, when he himself was so twisted and tainted.

"Yes." Her eyes met his and then darted away, lashes wavering tremulously. Edward was surprised. He hadn't expected her to reply; he'd thought she would stammer her excuses and escape, leaving him to feel guilty about the way he'd treated her. He waited for her to elaborate, to explain what made her so 'different'. But she stayed silent.

Frustrated, unwillingly, he asked the question. "How?" he says, "How are you different?"

Bella raised her eyes again and stared at him directly. "I can…" she hesitated again. Edward swore under his breath, unable to control his annoyance. He wasn't used to meeting somebody who wouldn't open up to him. Usually, girls fell over themselves to speak to him, spilling their deepest secrets in return for a flash of a smile. Exactly why, he had no idea. Perhaps it was the dark, brooding "I don't give a fuck" attitude. Perhaps it was the messy bronze hair, which apparently resembled whichever hot shot pretty boy actor of the moment was the current teen heart-throb.

All Edward knew was that pretty girls were generally putty in his hands; the plain ones even more so. Yet here was this totally average girl who was acting like he wasn't worthy of knowing whatever stupid shit made her so 'different'. As if she was special. _And she's not fucking special_, Edward thought to himself with an irrational anger. She was so normal it should have been a crime, with her brown hair and eyes and generic, unmemorable features. He'd seen prettier- got off with prettier too- yet for some reason he still couldn't bring himself to walk away. There was something about her which paralysed him to the spot, unable to leave or look anywhere but at those big, brown eyes and he was suddenly finding that he wanted to know every single detail about her.

And then she dropped her bombshell, and everything got even weirder.

"I see people's dreams," she blurted out.

The world seemed to miss a beat.

_Dreams._

"What?" Edward asked, after a pause which felt like purgatory.

"I see their dreams," Bella repeated, more quietly, her soft voice barely audible over the noise of the mall.

Edward stared over her. It sounded ridiculous; it was ridiculous. She could see dreams? Like a psychic or something? If Edward had heard this from anyone else, he would have burst out laughing, told them to fuck off and then walked away. But he was hearing it from Bella, so he didn't do any of those things. Somehow, coming from her, it seemed almost believable. Like they really could live in a world where she was the most capitivating, breath-taking girl he had ever come across and she really did see into other people's dreams. Which was why, instead of laughing or leaving, he asked the simple, million dollar question.

"Can you see mine?"

Bella's eyes met his, and she stared at him. There was a searching, unnatural quality to her gaze which made Edward's skin prickle nervously. Then, after an age of waiting, she replied.

"Yes, I can."

"And?" Edward didn't want to know the answer, but he asked anyway. He had to. Because if she really could see his dreams; if she really knew… well, call it a masochistic curiosity.

He watched her, waiting. She had the decency to blush and look away. "I'm… sorry."

Edward shivered. So she knew.

And then, just like that, he felt the anger rise again. Because this whole situation was ridiculous and he didn't know why he believed her but he did and if she really could see his dreams and knew what they contained then how could she think an apology was anything but fucking useless? Like she had any power to change what she saw; like she could help him. So why was she here, stirring shit up, making him get worked up about something that was totally unstoppable? Edward didn't know, but there was a scalding fury pumping through his veins like poison and he had to physically clench his fists to stop himself from hurting her. He ripped his gaze from her face, staring resolutely at the ground as he tried to control his breathing.

"Maybe I should go," he heard her whisper. He didn't reply; he couldn't contradict her. Not when it was taking all the power he had within him not to completely lose control over his emotions. "Tell me if you want me to stay," she said. There was a note to her voice which was almost akin to a plea, as though she wanted him to stop her leaving. But Edward still didn't speak. He didn't trust himself to.

A few silent, painful moments passed. Edward continued to stare at the ground, his chest heaving and sinking as his heart rate began to slow. Finally, once his anger had ebbed, he looked up. He'd half expected Bella to still be standing there.

But she'd already gone.

* * *

**A/N: **Thank you very much to everybody who has reviewed the story so far; it's great to know that people are enjoying it and curious to see how it develops. Your reviews inspire me to work hard to become a better writer - take this chapter, for example: since reading your reviews I've added a good 600 words of extra information/dialogue to improve it. Hope it paid off!

Also, I am having so much fun finding dream related songs for these chapters. If you have any suggestions of ones you think would work then leave them in a review!


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: **This chapter is the one that all the **abuse** **warnings/M rating **are for, so **please exercise caution**. I don't want to hurt anyone by allowing them to inadvertantly read something they find triggering or distressing.

**Chapter Song - **_Taking over Me _– Evanescence

* * *

_you don't remember me but i remember you  
i lie awake and try so hard not to think of you  
but who can decide what they dream?  
and dream i do..._

* * *

_His name is Rick and he's strikingly well-spoken for the rural, Mid-Western town where they live. He has blue eyes and jet black hair which aims to be dashingly Italianate, but his roots are a tell-tale shade of mousy brown that gives the game away. He works as a lower level sergeant at the local police station and is respected within the community. When they first get together, everybody talks about how lucky Elizabeth is to land herself such a catch, especially considering her _situation_. A single mother, abandoned by her family and far too fond of Smirnoff, she could do far worse than Rick O'Connel. So they say. _

_One night a month and a half after Rick first comes onto the scene, Edward is lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He's wearing his Jedi pyjamas. They're faded and too small and just a teensy bit babyish, but they're his favourites. Rick bought him some other ones a couple of weeks ago, but they were Star Trek, not Star Wars and Edward hadn't wanted to wear them. That had annoyed Rick for a little while, but Elizabeth had distracted him and, from the way he'd been glancing at her the whole time while giving Edward the gift, it was clear that the gesture had been aimed at her anyway. Edward still hasn't taken the pyjamas out of the wrapper. _

_His mom has been gone for approximately two hours and twenty four minutes. Not that he's counting, of course – that would mean he was scared of being alone, and if there was one thing Edward is not it's a scaredy cat. He's braver than all of the kids in his grade, for sure. Still, he doesn't really like it when Elizabeth goes out at night. The house makes weird noises when he's the only one in it. _

_Edward must doze off for a little while, because the next thing he knows he can hear the front door opening and the sound of laughter and footsteps. Edward tries to read the clock on his wall, but it's too dark to see it clearly and, anyway, he still isn't the greatest at telling the time. Then, his bedroom door swings open, the bright light from the hallway flooding in and blinding him. _

_"Hello darling," he hears his mom purr. He peers at her through blurry eyes and she laughs raucously. Edward can make out her and Ricks' shadowy figures framed by light in the doorway. Elizabeth comes over to his side and he sees her stumble a little on the way. Edward's heart sinks. He hates it when his mom gets like this. She practically falls to her knees by his bed and proceeds to cover him with kisses. She smells of that nasty, strong smell that always covers her every time she's been out. _

_"Don't you love me, sweetheart?" she implores. Edward kisses her back dutifully. "My beautiful, wonderful little boy," Elizabeth coos. Then, her gurgling is replaced by a cough, which develops into a racking wheeze. She straightens up and takes a few moments to recover. Then: "I'm going to go to my room," she murmurs, turning her back on her son. "Coming, Rick?" There's a suggestive undertone to her voice which makes Edward feel sick, although he doesn't quite understand why. _

_"Just a minute babe," Edward hears Rick reply. "Why don't you go and warm yourself up for me?" _

_"Okay," she giggles. Edward feels the vibrations of the floor as she half skips, half falls out of the room. _

_Edward stares at the ceiling. He does not want to talk to Rick. _

_But it seems Rick wants to talk to him. _

_"Hello, tyke." Rick's low voice suddenly seems a lot nearer and Edward realises that he has come across the room. There's a weight on the bed as he sits down. Edward squeaks quietly and shuffles to the edge, trying to put as much space between them as possible. "Ssssh, Edward, it's just me," Rick whispers in a voice which is clearly supposed to be consoling. "I think we need to have a little talk."_

_Edward does not reply. _

_"I get the feeling you don't like me, you see?" As Rick speaks, he pats the part of the duvet which covers Edward's thigh, in what is clearly supposed to be a chummy, reassuring gesture. His hand lingers there slightly too long. _

_"Why is that, do you think?" _Don't answer don't answer don't answer. _Edward doesn't know what to say anyway, and he hopes that by not speaking maybe Rick will think he's fallen asleep and get bored and go away. _

_"Is it because you don't want me as a daddy?" There's a rustle and a sudden breath of cold air as Edward feels his covers lift. He shuts his eyes. _

_"Or maybe it's because you want your mommy all to yourself?" Edward can hear the sound of fingers ghosting across his sheets. _

_"Are you jealous of how much time I spend with her? I don't blame you for that – your mother is really something special." Edward can feel the duvet move and because he doesn't want to think about Rick's hand creeping ever closer he makes himself remember the design on his duvet cover. It's of the San Diego Chargers' mascot – his mom bought it for him for his sixth birthday. He wishes his mom was here now, but she said she was going to bed._

_Rick is still talking to him, but now his voice has got lower and breathier and he's leaned in so close that his face is almost level with Edward's ear. Edward can feel his damp, hot breath on his neck. Meanwhile, the fingers that Edward had been ignoring start to travel across his stomach. _

_He thinks again of football and the Chargers and their chances in the league. But it doesn't work, because he still hears the sound of a zip go in the darkness, so he starts to relive the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke runs through the swamps. _

_And in Edward's head, the movements on his bed are just the creatures in the swamp and the hand below his waist is the murky mud that he has to wade through to get to the other side. And if he screws up his eyes tight enough, he can see the stars that hang in the sky above, lighting his way out the swamp, to safety. He starts to count them..._

_...and now he's counting the stars so furiously that he's losing track of how many there've been and going towards numbers he hasn't even learnt yet. Maybe if he shouts them in his head loud enough it'll be enough to wake Yoda up and start the next scene... Maybe it will stop him from feeling the mud pushing hard against him or hearing the low grunts of the forest as it sways around him, suffocating him. _

_Perhaps if he counts loud and fast enough he'll eventually fall asleep and this will become nothing more than a nightmare... _

... Edward woke up, shaking and panting, drenched in his own sweat. After a few disorientated seconds, he realised that he was sobbing. He raised his hands and clasped his throat, practically choking himself to make the sound stop. Once it had, he rolled on to his side, almost falling off the bed as he made himself get up. Kicking away the clammy bed covers, he rose shakily to his feet. A glance at the bedside clock told him it was 3.a.m. He staggered to a door on the right wall, which opened onto a tiny washroom. He stared at himself in the mirror. His face was pale, his hair on end. There were beads of sweat still lingering around his eyebrows. He looked at his own eyes; they were bloodshot. The memory of Rick's bloodshot eyes looking down at him suddenly came back full force and, unable to stop himself, Edward wretched, vomiting into the sink.

Afterwards he just stood there, trembling over the basin, his arms barely supporting himself from falling down. His breaths were ragged and felt sharp and sickly inside his chest. Snatches from the dream kept bursting into his mind, creating a double vision which jarred nauseatingly with the reality of his darkened bedroom.

_sssh, Edward, it's just me – a weight on the bed – stars..._

He let out another strangled sob, and ducked back over the basin to wretch once more.

When he submerged, his mind was made up.

...

Ten minutes, a quick shower and a pair of crumpled clothes from the floor later, Edward found himself jamming the keys into the ignition of his car and driving out onto the road with a screech.

A yellow post-it note sat on the passenger seat. Written on it in neat, regulated handwriting was an address. Above it was a name:

_Bella Swan._

* * *

**A/N**: Short, I know, but the next one will be up soon. Thanks so much for all the comments/constructive criticism you left on the last chapter. It surprised me that so many people thought Bella had been too abrupt with the big reveal - I never thougt of it like that before, but following your comments it's definitely something I'll consider changing if I rewrite. Apologies also for my mistakes re: Americano and canon inconstistencies (like saying Edward had brown hair. Duhhhh...)

Hope you liked the chapter :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Song: **_Bad Dream – _Keane (thanks to 3 Sunrises for the suggestion!)

* * *

_I wake up, it's a bad dream  
No one on my side  
I was fighting  
But I just feel too tired  
To be fighting  
Guess I'm not the fighting kind  
Wouldn't mind it  
If you were by my side_

* * *

Bella was, for once, actually asleep. She awoke to the sound of a light tapping. She looked around in the darkness, bleary eyed, confused and more than a little bit pissed off. She had been _sleeping_. Uninterrupted, private sleep – gold dust. And something (or someone?) had woken her up.

She scrambled to her feet and rubbed her eyes, looking around the room for a possible source of the tapping. It wasn't coming from outside the door. It wasn't her clock – that was digital. It wasn't _hailing_, was it? The thought of a hailstorm in Arizona in April was so unlikely that it was almost interesting enough to warrant her having been woken up in the middle of the night. Bella crossed to the window and drew back the curtains. She scanned the sky. No, no hail. So why the tapping?

Then she heard it again, only this time it was much louder and accompanied by a small yet definitely noticeable vibration at the bottom of the window pane. Bella looked down, more confused than ever.

What she saw almost gave her the shock of her life.

Edward Masen was standing on her front lawn, staring up at her, his car parked haphazardly on the drive behind him, its rear end sticking out blocking the sidewalk. His face was half illuminated by the yellow light from the streetlamps and Bella could just make out that his trademark messy hair was even more of a car crash than usual. His posture was rigid, his expression thunderous.

Bella suddenly realised her heart was racing. What was he _doing _here? She hadn't seen him for weeks, not since that incredibly awkward moment in the garden center. On the three occasions that she'd gone to do his gardening since, Edward had been conspicuously absent from the house. Not that she'd been surprised.

No matter how many times she'd relived and overanalysed that conversation in the intervening weeks, Bella still couldn't understand what had driven her to tell Edward her secret. She'd kept it for years without telling a soul, not even her own mother, and then all of a sudden she'd just blurted the truth out on a Sunday morning over a pot of geraniums to a beautiful stranger with serious anger management issues. She wondered what she had expected. Honestly, his simply telling her to leave was one of the best possible outcomes, considering the circumstances.

If it hadn't been so terrible, she would have laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. Bella still didn't know exactly what had prompted her to spill her issues into his atmosphere in such a way. There was just something about him, be it his anger, his hatred or his determination to render himself totally incapable of being saved. There was something in the midst of it all that reminded Bella of herself and her own self-imposed isolation – her certainty that nobody was worth knowing or loving, not even herself. And there in that split second she'd thought that here was someone who was equally destroyed as she was and maybe, just maybe, they could find some sort of comfort in each other.

Or maybe not.

But then, he was here at 3.30am in the morning. And whatever that meant, good or bad, she couldn't simply leave him standing here. So, although Bella felt nothing but apprehension at the sight of Edward Masen on her driveway hours before the crack of dawn, she didn't hesitate in spinning around and moving as quietly and swiftly as she could out of her room, across the landing, down the stairs and to the front door.

When it came to actually opening the door, however, she did so with caution. It might have _looked_ like Edward standing outside, but it could just have easily have been a random psychopath burglar. In fact, that was probably more likely than it being Edward, considering how she'd left things between them three weeks ago.

Bella pulled the door towards her, peering uncertainly underneath the latch. Standing there on the path just below the front steps was Edward.

She felt her breath catch. It really was him, right down to his too-big hands and pale, drawn out skin. He looked like an emotional wreck.

Both reassured and slightly alarmed, Bella undid the latch and opened the door fully.

She stared at Edward. He stared back. His green eyes were wild and red-rimmed.

"Hi," she said.

* * *

She looked totally freaked out. Edward didn't blame her; any normal person _would _be. Someone they _barely know, _who practically screamed at them the last time they spoke, randomly turns up on their doorstep in the middle of the night looking like he's been dragged through hell and back. She probably thought he'd been drinking, or worse.

And he had no idea in hell what to say to her. Tell her why he was here? He didn't even know himself.

"Uh, hi," he finally managed to say back. Bella was still staring at him, the surprise and unease clear on her face. There was something else there too, Edward thought. It was a bit like... concern? Although why would she be concerned about him? It was probably more anxiety that he was going to try and attack her or something.

She looked a little bit scared, too. With a pang of guilt Edward thought again of that time at the garden centrer and wondered if she was thinking about it too. He felt bad for the way he had shouted at her, but at the time he'd been so shocked by her words, sound terrified at what she was suggesting – that she actually _knew _and had _seen_ what he'd gone through – that he hadn't been able to control his anger. He wished he hadn't done it, not least because he was suddenly realising that he really didn't like seeing Bella Swan upset.

Then he remembered that he still hadn't said anything or offered any kind of explanation as to why he was here on Bella's doorstep in the middle of the night.

"Look I'm... I'm really sorry about this." he said, running a hand through his already terrible hair and glancing around awkwardly, looking everywhere but at Bella. "I don't usually do this kind of psycho stalker shit, but I... I had to talk to someone and you said you... you said you could... you said you'd seen..." he trailed off, before finally forcing himself to meet Bella's eyes. "The dream. The same one I always have. I had it again. It was worse than it's been for years. And it was awful and I didn't know what to do so I came here, okay? And now I don't even know why and I guess I'd better just turn around and pretend this never happened. I won't harass you when you come to do the plants on Sunday, if you still want to come, that is, and don't think I'm crazy." Edward finished in a almost incomprehensible spew of words, his face hot as he waited for Bella to laugh. He felt more embarrassed than he'd ever been in his life and, with a rush of horror, realised he was close to tears. He clenched his fists as a way of fighting them back.

Then he realised that Bella wasn't laughing. She was watching him with that same look of quiet, selfless, heart-breaking concern. Then, finally she spoke:

"Do you want to come inside?"

"_What?_"

"Do you want to come inside?" She repeated. "Just to... you know, cool down for a while. Have a cup of tea, or something. We don't have to talk about it or anything," she said hurriedly, "not if you don't want to. It's just... well, you probably shouldn't drive back home just yet."

She finished and looked at Edward tentatively, waiting for his response. He gaped back at her.

_Tea._ His entire world was falling apart and she'd just offered to make it better with a cup of tea.

"Uh, yeah," he finally said. "That'd be good."

* * *

They _did _talk about it, as a matter of fact. Over hot cups of Lipton's and a couple of untouched rock solid cookies Bella had found at the back of the closet, Edward told Bella some more things about his dream. Not all the details, not by a long shot. Just the basics. Just what was needed to help him calm down and relax – the conversation acting as a form of healing catharsis, like poison being drawn from a wound. They also talked about other things. Bella told Edward a bit about her ability – when she'd first discovered it, what it felt like, how she dealt with it. She explained about the day they had met and the reason she had crashed into his yard. She didn't, of course, say that his dream was the worst she'd ever experienced. She didn't want to push him back to the edge.

They also sat in silence for a long time. There was, surprisingly, a lot less awkwardness than either of them had expected. By the end, the atmosphere could even be called easy, companionable. Several hours later, when the sky was just beginning to grow light, the hint of dawn pressing at the horizon, Edward said, with some regret, that he'd better be leaving.

Bella nodded. She showed him to the door. He stood on the threshold, looking at her with a torn, undecided expression. Finally he said:

"Thank you. Thanks for letting me in and... listening. It would have been totally reasonable for you to make me go home."

"Any time."

And they both knew she meant it.

"So... I guess I'll see you on Sunday, then? Doing the garden?" Bella nodded. "Oh, cool. See you, then."

And then he left, getting into his car and driving away down the silent street.

Bella watched him go. Then she turned around and closed the door behind her.

Outside, the dawn broke.

* * *

From then on, things changed between Bella and Edward. It was as though their dispute in the center and all that had followed had cleared the tension between them, to be replaced by a respectful understanding. It's almost impossible to sit up all night with a person and hear about some of their deepest darkest secrets, albeit in little detail, and _not _form some kind of bond. Yet this swiftly grew into something more. Edward and Bella's relationship might have formed because of their dreams, but the tentative friendship that developed between them came completely of its own accord.

Neither of them really noticed it happening, it was so gradual. They began to find excuses to spend time together and in doing so discovered that they had a surprising amount in common.

"You've seen _La Haine_?" It was a Sunday afternoon and Bella had just finished her work in Elizabeth's garden for the day. She'd come inside the house to wash the soil off of her hands, and was passing the open door into the living room when she stopped, overtaken by surprise.

On the couch, with his back to the door, Edward started slightly. He twisted away from the TV set to look at Bella, and it was obvious by his expression that he hadn't heard her come in. Without looking, he pressed pause on the remote and the movie he'd been watching froze, the black and white images suddenly suspended like a newspaper photograph.

"What was that?" he asked, his eyes on Bella. She blushed slightly at suddenly having his undivided attention.

"I said, I didn't know you've seen _La Haine_," Bella motioned at the frozen screen. Edward's incredible green eyes were still trained upon her and she could feel her cheeks getting hotter by the second. She started to wish she had just quietly let herself out of the house.

Edward looked adorably confused. "Why would you know?" he said, his brow furrowed slightly.

He had a point. _Because there's this weird connection between us and somehow, I feel like I should know everything about you? _No, that wasn't exactly an acceptable response.

"It's just, I really like French films," Bella said. This was true, albeit not the right answer. "I'm a bit of a Francophile, actually. _La Haine_'s my favourite. I love the realism of it. It's so gritty."

Edward was looking at her with an unreadable expression. Bella felt nervous, like she'd shared too much. Like maybe she'd misinterpreted his signals – as though they weren't ready for exchanging this kind of personal information just yet. Then Edward spoke, breaking her from her insecurities.

"Do you want to watch the rest with me?"

_Hell yes. _

"Yeah."

And so Bella found herself spending the rest of her Sunday afternoon on the Masens' couch, the foreign language washing pleasantly over her as she pretended not to notice the fact that Edward was barely a person width's away from her. Despite the inevitable shades of awkwardness, it was one of the best hours in Bella's memory.

That day was the first of many similar conversations in which they learnt each other's likes and dislikes. They differed as much as they agreed, but somehow that didn't matter; it was the discussion itself which brought them closer:

_"McEwan, is a genius." _

_"McEwan is an arrogant asshole, disgustingly smug about his own talent."_

_"How can you say that?" _

_"Because I've read his novels." _

or:

_"That's your most played song? Really?"_

_"What's wrong with Motion City Soundtrack?"_

_"Oh, come on."_

_"What?"_

_"Do you try to be pretentiously indie, or does it come naturally?"_

They found stolen moments in which to talk – before or after Bella's hour of gardening, 'coincidental' meetings at the local shopping centre and half hour detours on the way home from their respective schools – and before long, neither Bella nor Edward could imagine a time before they had been in each other's lives.

Which was how, one Saturday afternoon in April, Edward found himself doing something he'd never done before. He took Bella to the spot.

It was a quiet, secluded place by the river, hidden from the road by a raised sandbank. There, stuck in the place where the grit and stone met the sand, was the shell of an aged, rotted boat. Some storm had turned it onto its side so it stuck upright in the sand, providing the perfect sheltered place to sit. Edward had discovered it a couple of weeks after arriving in Arizona, but today was the first time he had ever brought Bella here. The expression on her face when he told her she was the only person he had ever told about the place had lifted his heart.

They were sat on the ground, gazing quietly out over the river in comfortable silence. The sun was low in the sky, and the clouds were tinged with pink. Edward had wondered ruefully whether he should have thought to bring a blanket before he picked Bella up from work, but she didn't seem to mind sitting on the damp sand. Edward was relieved; he hadn't pegged her as one of those high maintenance girls.

Since they got there they'd talked a lot, from Bella's day at the garden centre – _uneventful _– to the latest plant Bella had salvaged for Elizabeth's garden. Now they'd moved on to discussing the play Edward was reading for English Lit.

"Oh come on, you don't feel even slightly sorry for him?" Bella asked, her expression incredulous.

Edward shook his head. "No, not at all. Macbeth _chooses_ to murder Duncan to steal his crown, he's the bad guy."

"But Lady Macbeth talks him into it!"

"So? He's a grown man; he's responsible for his own actions. You can't blame stuff like that on another person. It's like saying that it's okay to hit a child just because you were hit growing up. It's not okay, in fact; it's worse." The grin that had crept on to his face as they debated had begun to slip away, as the conversation took a more sobering turn. Bella looked slightly stricken; she clearly hadn't meant him to interpret her comments like that.

Edward kicked himself inwardly for being unable to have a totally normal conversation without somehow relating it back to stuff best left forgotten. He searched for something to say to salvage the situation.

"I do sympathise with Macbeth in some ways, though," he said quickly. Bella smiled faintly, unsure.

"How?"

"You know how after he kills Duncan, he can't sleep anymore? 'Sleep no more! –'

"'Macbeth doth murder sleep'", Bella interrupted, nodding. The expression on her face was unreadable. "Yeah, I know. What about it?"

"Well, I feel sorry for him," Edward replied, "It must be awful, not being able to sleep. Even when... even when the dreams are really bad, I still welcome the ability to sleep. It's the only time you get to be truly alone, you know? It's like a chance to confront your self conscious or whatever – just focus on _you, _instead of other people." He stopped, and looked up, suddenly feeling uncertain. He hadn't meant it to come across as that deep, and he was worried that Bella might mock him or think he was pretentious.

What he had not expected was to find that her eyes were filled with tears. He stared at her in shock. "What's wrong?" She just shook her head, and attempted to brush away the tears, her eyes dropping to stare at the ground.

It suddenly struck Edward that he wasn't the only person who might find the topic of sleep affecting. He thought wryly about how misguided his attempt at lightening the tone had been. He looked back at Bella. There were no more tears, but she was staring pointedly at the ground, fixedly nudging the sand with a shard of shell in her right hand.

Edward wanted to breach the gap between them. He wanted to take them back to where they'd just been – easily discussing books without the reminder of their problems dividing them and making everything sour. Automatically, instinctively, he reached out and put his hand on hers. Bella froze, the shell slipping from her fingers. Her eyes met his.

And slowly, hesitantly, she turned her palm to meet his. Their fingers interlocked and Edward felt a slow-burning warmth spreading up inside him. Bella was blushing, and Edward had a feeling that his cheeks might have started to colour too.

Later in their lives, Bella and Edward might have looked back at this moment and decided that it was the turning point which had marked the beginning of their collective future. That tentative brush of skin on skin, barely perceptible but as electric as lightning, the quickening of pulses and the pink blush of anticipation as they both realised what had been resolutely there the whole time – these were the components of an instant that would come to define their entire lives.

Maybe it was just the natural progression from that fateful day when Bella crashed her car into Edward's yard. Or maybe it was destined. Perhaps Edward and Bellas' lives had always been leading up to this moment, all the pain that had confronted them along the way simply obstacles on a route to absolution – a path to this moment of epiphany in the middle of a silent riverbank under a coral twilight.

That touch and all that it conceived could have happened for any number of reasons. But in that precise moment, Edward cared nothing for theories. All that mattered to him was the present; for possibly the first time in his nearly adult life, his thoughts were free from the legacy of the past. He did what felt right. He leaned towards Bella, brushing her hair away from her face with their intertwined hands.

And then he kissed her.

* * *

**A/N**: I know I'm throwing these out at a rate of knots but I'm going away to Ireland for two weeks on Friday so I'd like to get it finished before then.


	6. Chapter 6

_**A/N: **_Thank you for all your feedback, positive or otherwise. It's really helping me develop my writing etc. Some of you mentioned that you were disappointed at how fast the fic is moving - it's true that unlike my other chapter fic this story is more of a novella. I originally wrote it as a oneshot, which might explain why it feels like it's a bit compressed.

**Chapter Song - **_I don't sleep, I dream _– R.E.M (Again thanks to 3 Sunrises for the suggestion!)

* * *

_I'm looking for an interruption,  
Do you believe?  
You looking to dig my dreams  
Be prepared for anything  
You come into my little scene  
Hooray, hooray, hip hip hooray  
There's one thing I can guarantee:  
You won't have to dig, dig too deep  
Said leave me to lay, but touch me deep,  
I don't sleep, I dream_

* * *

From the very start, Bella knew that her and Edward's relationship was not going to be easy.

It just wasn't as simple as requited love and physical attraction, although they had both those things in plentiful supply. In fact, those they were the _least _of their problems, Bella sometimes thought to herself, if their now-much-more-frequent meetings at the riverbank were anything to go by. The thought of these blissful snatched seconds of privacy and all that they contained were enough to make Bella's face flush and her insides pool with warmth.

No, Bella and Edwards' feelings for each other definitely weren't the problem. It was all the other stuff (and by 'other stuff', Bella invariably meant their _pasts_) which prevented them from having a relationship which could be anywhere near normal.

For example: the fact that they both had 'tense' familial situations meant that it was very difficult for them to simply find a place to _be _together. Bella knew that her Mom would probably be _delighted _that she had finally found a boy willing to go out with her (the lack of such boys being the reason for which Renee had always assumed that Bella was single), but it was this very enthusiasm which made her reluctant to ever allow a situation where she or Phil might actually discover Edward's existence. Bella was perceptive enough to know that a boyfriend wasn't going to be enough to breach the gap between her and her mother, and that it might just renew Renee's fanaticism in the 'Make Bella Popular' plan.

Edward was even keener to keep their relationship a secret from his mom. It was out of the question that Elizabeth knew, as far as he was concerned. Bella didn't fully understand why, but she had a feeling that Edward simply didn't trust his mother not to screw up every single aspect of his life.

Bella and Edward didn't talk to each other about their pasts much. Since that first time when she'd explained about her power and he'd told her everything, they had mainly avoided the topic. It wasn't that they were afraid to discuss it so much as they simply didn't want it to define their relationship.

As they spent more time together, Bella noticed the change in Edward. He was becoming more relaxed, less on edge. He smiled with a frequency close to regularity and she wondered whether a part of him felt relieved to have finally shared the burden of his nightmares with someone else. She didn't want to screw this progress up by forcing him to dwell on stuff he'd rather forget. But sometimes it was inevitable. Sometimes, there was no way to avoid the subject.

One such instance cropped up not long after their first time at the spot.

It was a Tuesday evening and they were sitting in a diner on the edge of the city, near where the coastal road met the motorway. Bella had crept out of the house to be there, her mom and step-dad too engrossed in throwing a dinner party to notice her absence. Edward had picked her up from the end of her street. In response to Bella's question on the drive over, Edward had explained that his Mom was at home, in bed. Bella could tell from his tone that she was not alone.

It was even more obvious in the diner. Even if Edward's behaviour in the car hadn't given away the fact his mind was in other, darker places, his subdued distraction as they ate their meal definitely would have done. It made Bella irrationally angry. Not with him – no, never with Edward – but with his Mom and her string of boyfriends and how stupid and _naive _she'd been and how she _still _didn't seem to have any idea of how much pain her actions caused her son. So it was on the cusp of this anger and frustration that Bella blurted out the question which had plagued her ever since she'd first seen Edward's nightmare:

"Did you ever tell her?"

"What?" he asked, looking up from the forlorn bacon bap on the plate before him. There were shadows beneath his eyes and his brow was fixed into a frown. He looked weary, sad and vulnerable and Bella paused, wondering belatedly if it had been a good idea to bring this topic up. Now she had his attention, though, she'd have to run with it, for better or worse. She took a breath.

"I was just wondering if, you know, you ever told your mom. About what happened, that time..." she was already blushing furiously by the time she'd finished the sentence. She stared at her plate in embarrassment, internally berating her own stupidity. _Why why, WHY _had she asked him? What if he was angry? What if he left? She waited, heart bounding, for him to shout or get up from the table and walk away. Yet even as the moments ticked by, she could see out of the corner of her eye that he was still sitting at the table.

So, with another calming breath, Bella forced herself to look up and meet Edward's eyes. She was shocked by his expression. It was surprisingly calm; there was no anger in those green eyes. He looked slightly sad, yes, but not devastatingly so. Bella wondered what that meant.

"No, I never told her," he replied, quietly.

Bella had already guessed that would be the answer, but it still prompted a whole round of new questions. She hesitated, unsure as to whether she should push her luck by asking Edward to relate more. Then she decided that it was worth taking a chance to finally find out the truth.

"So she doesn't know?"

"No."

"Then how come you moved away?" Edward seemed taken aback at how readily the question had slipped off Bella's tongue. A shadow passed over his eyes and his features hardened a fraction. The effect was like that of a shutter going down over a window; it was as though in an instant all the emotions that had previously been plain to see had been covered, protecting Edward's innermost thoughts from any outside scrutiny. It was the same defence mechanism Bella recognised from the time she had first met Edward, all those weeks ago. Bella's heart lurched and she blushed again and bowed her head.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, reaching out for his hand, "I didn't mean it to turn into an interrogation. I just... I'm just trying to understand the whole picture. You don't have to tell me anything, if you don't want to." It was true. Bella would never try and pressure Edward into talking about his experiences. She simply wanted to learn more about what had happened so she could begin to try and find a way to make things better for him. She looked back at him and hoped he understood.

For a few moments Edward's features remained unreadable, his expression as unyielding and uninformative as fog. Then, suddenly, he loosened, his posture relaxing and expression softening. _And the shield comes back up_, Bella thought. She breathed an internal sigh of relief; she had been let back in. For a moment there she had worried she'd blown it forever.

"No, it's okay," Edward said, squeezing her hand. "It's just hard to talk about. I've never told anyone about it before." Bella nodded quickly to show her complete understanding. The effect was too effusive, to the point where she actually managed to crick her neck in the process. Her hand instinctively flew up to rub the ache, and at the sight of such discomfort arising from such an extreme eagerness to please, Edward burst out laughing.

And just like that, the uncomfortable, self-conscious mood which had been weighing down their conversation all evening melted away.

"I'm sorry," Edward chuckled at Bella's expression, which was confused, surprised and relieved in equal measure. "But that was comedic gold."

"I'm glad you think so," Bella smiled, not bothering to feign offence at his words. She took her hand away from her neck and placed it on his shoulder to steady herself as she leaned over the table to kiss him gently. She felt him smile under her lips and return the kiss, but then too soon – _always too soon_ – he pulled away.

"You shouldn't distract me if you want an answer to your question," Edward said in a low, velvety voice that made pleasant shivers run up Bella's spine.

"I told you, you don't have to answer it," Bella replied quickly, but Edward raised a finger to her lips, stunning her into silence.

"I want to answer it," he said seriously, "I want to be honest with you. You were honest with me." He brought his hand back down to rest on the table and a small part of Bella lamented its loss. "We moved away because Elizabeth walked in one day and caught...Rick," here, he faltered slightly, and Bella rubbed his hand consolingly. She'd heard that name screamed too many times in Edward's nightmares not to know how hard it was for him to recall. "She caught him being a bit rough with me. I can't even remember why – probably because I'd been smart with him or refused to get him some chips or something. Or maybe I wasn't being as compliant with him that night." His expression darkened, and his free right fist tightened on the edge of the table, the knuckles white with strain. "Whatever the reason, he'd hit me pretty hard. My lip was cut and my face was swollen. I was crying, backed up against the wall, when Elizabeth came in. She freaked out; she was really upset. They had a huge fight and she kicked him out of the house." Edward's eyes narrowed and he stared down at the table. "When she started shouting, I thought for a moment that he was going to hit _her, _but he didn't. He didn't touch her, not that time. He never hurt her in front of me; it was like he wanted me to believe that I was the only one _special_ enough for him to attack." Edward almost spat this last part, and there was a broken, ugly tone to his voice which broke Bella's heart.

"I'm so sorry, Edward," she said. It was a useless thing to say, but it was all she could manage. Bella had never felt so helpless in her life, not even on the thousands of occasions that she had been paralysed by dreams against her will. At least then she had been the only one to suffer. Edward's pain was far more difficult to bear. She couldn't see his face, so she had no way of knowing if he had heard her words, let alone acknowledged them. He continued, regardless.

"After he'd gone, Elizabeth asked me if Rick had ever hit me before. I told her he had. It wasn't even a lie; he could get pretty... violent when I didn't play along with his games."

Bella felt sick with anger.

"She packed our bags and we drove out of town that night. Elizabeth didn't have any idea where we were going; she just drove along the road, randomly taking turns at whim. She was sobbing the whole time. It's a wonder she didn't crash the car." He stopped, and finally forced himself to look up at Bella. His eyes were red.

"So she never knew?" Bella said, tentatively. "She never knew about... everything else." Edward shook his head.

Bella didn't ask Edward why he hadn't told his mother the full story. She didn't want to put him through any more emotional strain tonight, and anyway, she had a pretty good idea of what his response would be. Bella knew what it felt like to have a secret you couldn't tell anyone, for fear it would cause more harm than good. She understood what it felt like not to be able to talk to your own mother. She knew how it felt to secretly blame them for something that had happened to you.

"She's not a saint, Bella," Edward suddenly said. He was staring at Bella with a fierce, almost fire-like emotion in his eyes. It was almost as though he was trying to justify his own anger. "Elizabeth, I mean. Sure, she drove us out of the town when she found out about Rick, but that was only once she'd had the evidence of what was going on thrust under her nose and she couldn't ignore it any more. If she'd paid attention, maybe she would have worked it out sooner. Maybe it never would have happened in the first place."

Bella knew that there was nothing she could say or do to persuade Edward otherwise. In truth, she wasn't sure if she disagreed with him. So she just kept tight hold of his hand, in the hope that it would calm him back to normal, and soothe the pain away.

Outside, the lights of the passing cars blurred into long trails of light, linking the highway in chains.

It was Edward who finally suggested they left the diner. He had all but dragged Bella out of the place when he'd realised that the old lady a couple of tables away looked like she was dangerously close to dozing off over her Jacket potato. After emptying the contents of his scant wallet on the table to settle the bill, Edward had firmly led Bella to the car. On the way home, his eyes had kept darting off the road to check on her, or else scanning the nearby streets and houses. A couple of times he muttered something under his breath about not realising how late it was and Bella distinctly heard him use the word 'reckless'.

But their journey passed unscathed. Not once did Bella feel her eyes rolling back in their sockets; not once did the deafening roaring assault her ears. Her mind remained impervious to the attacks of other peoples' dreams. As they parked outside Bella's house, Edward asked curiously why that was. She reminded him of the unpredictable nature of the power.

It was the first lie Bella had ever told Edward.

Well, half-lie. It was a lie because Bella knew full well why she hadn't been affected by any dreams, and it was not the reason she had given Edward. However, the true reason _was_ yet another example of how unpredictable her power could be.

Because the truth was this: for the past few months, Bella Swan had been seeing one set of dreams more than any other; in the last couple of weeks, they had been _all _she'd seen.

And those dreams belonged to Edward Masen.

* * *

_Next chapter will be up tomorrow. _


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: **I am so so sorry about the wait for this chapter. After (stupidly) promising that I'd post it the day after chapter 6, I decided that I wanted to edit it a bit and would hold it back until it was 'perfect'. But then, you know, life happened (A Level results, holidays, moving to France...) and I haven't got around to it and, if I'm honest, it's unlikely I ever will. I've lost the motivation for Twilight fic. Finally decided that an imperfect ending is better than no ending at all.

* * *

**Chapter Song: **_Dream On_ -Aerosmith

__

_

* * *

_

_The past is gone  
It went by, like dusk to dawn  
Isn't that the way  
Everybody's got their dues in life to pay_

Yeah, I know nobody knows  
Where it comes and where it goes  
I know it's everybody's sin  
You got to lose to know how to win

(Dream On Dream On Dream On  
Dream until your dream comes true)

_

* * *

_

Bella found that the weeks passed unbelievably quickly when she was with Edward - almost dangerously so. Without warning, April had dissolved into May and all of a sudden Finals were upon them. Although Bella didn't especially care about the exams, she felt she ought to at least make some kind of effort towards them. After all, there was always college to think about... Plus, she didn't see the point in going out of her way to further distress Renee. While her mother had never exactly supported her in her studies, Bella knew that, in absence of any kind of social life, how she did in school suddenly became the only thing Renee could show off about to her friends. Bombing the exams would

not go down well, seeing as Renee had no idea that all of Bella's revision time was going on hanging out her secret boyfriend.

So, with about as much enthusiasm as an addict shows relinquishing their daily hit, Bella began to cut back on her time spent with Edward. They still saw each other most days, but it was for shorter, condensed periods of time when Bella's mind was invariably too saturated by calculus theorems or dates of European treaties to pay much attention to anything else. She didn't feel too guilty though, because Edward had recently become just as, if not more, distant. Maybe if Bella hadn't been so preoccupied she would have stopped to wonder why. After all, Edward had never been the type to worry about school work. But between her self-absorption and hectic revision timetable, she forgot to find time to ask. So his sudden strangeness went unnoticed or unmarked upon, and Bella went to sleep every night willing for the exams to be over.

She barely even noticed how rarely she saw Edward's dream anymore.

The exams passed in a haze of tiredness and anxiety. When Bella walked out of the last one, her relief was so overwhelming that she forgot to worry over whether she'd conjugated her verbs or applied the subjunctive correctly. They were over. The exams were over, and now all she had to think about was the long, golden summer stretching out before her. Her first summer with Edward, with endless time at their disposal and endless sunshine-filled days just waiting to be spent in their spot by the sea.

Bella walked through the school gates and towards the car park, lost in contemplation of this enticing thought. It wasn't until she'd almost reached her car that she noticed there was already someone standing there.

It's funny how certain things always seem like tired clichés until you experience them yourself. How many times had Bella read the words 'and then her heart skipped a beat' and rolled her eyes, turning the page? She'd always wondered why the author couldn't find a better way to express their character's shock or fear than through something which was probably physiologically impossible, let alone underwhelmingly unoriginal.

Yet as Bella stood there in the car park, staring into Edward's eyes, she suddenly completely understood where those authors had been coming from. Because her heart had more than skipped a beat – it might have well as stopped beating altogether, for how terrified she felt. The Edward staring back at her was not one she recognised. His eyes were wild and red from what could only have been hours of tears. His features were contorted with such explicit anger that made Bella shivered – it was like that time in the mall, only much, much worse. That Edward had had some semblance of control. This one was almost feral.

Bella stood rooted to the spot, her eyes wide with fear. She longed to go towards him, but at the same time she was scared to. Not of him hurting her, as much as that he might react to her advance by hurting himself.

"Edward?" she asked, her voice faltering with uncertainty. "What's wrong?"

"It's him," he said. He was shaking.

Bella suddenly felt cold, despite the blazing sun beating down on the back of her neck.

"Who?" She didn't need to ask. There was only one 'him' who could illicit this kind of reaction from Edward. But still, Bella wanted to delay the truth.

"Who do you fucking think?" Edward snarled back, and Bella felt herself recoil. He hadn't spoken to her like that for months. "It's Rick. He's here. In Arizona."

"How..."

"Does it matter?" Edward all but shouted, glaring at Bella. "I have no clue how the bastard found us, but he did and now he's here. He was in the same bar as Elizabeth last night. She went back to his hotel room." Bella felt her stomach jolt. She looked at Edward hesitantly.

"Did they..." she couldn't bring herself to say the words out loud.

Edward let out a harsh, ugly laugh. "Fuck? Of course they did. I told you; she still loves him. She blames me for splitting them up."

"No, Edward, that's not true," Bella said quickly. "She doesn't blame you, she chose to leave, remember? You told me she drove you both out of town the minute she found out -"

"Yeah, and she cried all the way," Edward interrupted. "Don't you remember me telling you that part? Oh, sure, she left him, because she knew that was what she was supposed to do. But that hasn't stopped her missing him ever since and holding me responsible for fucking up her life."

"She doesn't," Bella whispered, horrified, "she doesn't hold you responsible, she - "

"Shut up." Edward interrupted her again, and this time his tone was low. "Seriously, just shut the fuck up."

There was something in his voice which told Bella there was no point arguing. Edward didn't want to listen to reason. He didn't want to hear her reassurances that it was all going to be okay. He was past the point where comfort or faith could provide him with any kind of relief.

And it was the realisation of this fact that led Bella to ask her next question.

"What are you going to do?"

He met her eyes. His own were still red-rimmed.

"Leave."

Bella had expected that response, but it didn't stop her feeling as though she had been kicked in the gut. Edward must have noticed her reaction and raised an eyebrow, his expression containing something between scorn and sorrow.

"What, did you think I was going to stay here and play happy fucking families? I can't, Bella. You know me better than that."

She nodded, trying to mask the fact that she suddenly felt unable to breathe. Her insides were churning, her heart pounding and it felt like everything was beginning to black out. Like the world was getting smaller, somehow. Edward leaving. Leaving forever.

"Are you coming with me?"

His voice was louder, closer, and Bella jumped in surprise. The question caught her off guard, shattering through her introspection. She looked wildly up at Edward. He was barely a pace away from her now, and she could see every inch of his face, every detail of his features. It was like staring at the sun during an eclipse. And somehow, in that split second, everything else in the universe fell away; the car park dissolved and the ground beneath swirled into nothingness to the point that everything in Bella's life seemed to begin and end with Edward.

And then the moment broke, and reality hit Bella like a freight train, as she suddenly realised the implications of what Edward had just asked her.

"W-what?" she stuttered, heart still pumping. You're kidding, right?

"I said, are you coming with me?" His eyes were intense and enthralling, but at the same time terrifying.

Bella wanted it to be as easy as saying 'yes'. She wanted to run away with Edward and never look back. But she was scared to; she was scared of all it might mean, scared of leaving the only life she had ever known behind.

"I..." she hesitated.

It was enough to break the deal. Edward let his hand fall from Bella's wrist and he took a step back.

"Fine." And then, just like before, the mask came up. Blocking Bella out, sealing her off from his thoughts and emotion.

"Edward," she pleaded. "Don't go."

But he'd already turned and started to walk away. At her words, he broke into a jog.

"Edward, come back!" Bella found herself calling. But he didn't look around, instead just broke into an even faster run. Bella watched him sprint away from her, out of the parking lot, down the street and then around the corner. She had no idea where he was going.

"Please," she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. "I'm sorry."

And then: "I love you."

Bella barely registered anything from her drive home. Through the nearly never ending sheets of tears, she somehow managed to get back to her house without breaking the law or causing any damage to herself or others, but it was a close call. All the time, only one word played on loop through her consciousness.

Edward. Edward. Edward.

When she finally arrived home, Bella found the front door locked. Swearing, she pulled out her key and let herself in.

It was silent in the house. The lights were all off.

"Hello?" Bella called out. She got no answer. She hadn't expected to. There was clearly nobody home.

Moving on to the kitchen, Bella noticed a plate on the table with a note stuck on top. It was signed with her mother's name.

Bella picked the note up into her hands and looked it over. Individual words and phrases stuck out – Gone away, last minute, holiday, Jacksonville, a couple of weeks...

Bella stared, numbed, at the piece of paper in her hands.

Renee and Phil had gone on holiday to Florida.

She reread the words written in Renee's showy, cursive script, searching for something else - perhaps a word or two asking how her last exam had gone, or an apology for the suddenness of their departure. But there was nothing but a rushed postscript asking if Bella wouldn't mind picking up her dry-cleaning.

This isn't fair.

Very slowly, Bella scrunched the note up in her fist and then dropped it on the floor.

You deserve better than this.

And then, she picked up the plate that the note had been attached to – sellotaped there like some fucking restaurant bill – and hurled it with all her might at the opposite wall.

It shattered with an almighty crash, and Bella watched the pieces fall to the ground. And then, for the first time in her life, Bella finally let all her emotions explode.

In the aftermath, when she had screamed until her throat was hoarse and cried until there were no more tears, Bella quietly went upstairs to her room. Ten minutes later, she returned with a hold-all flung over her shoulder. She left a piece of paper on the kitchen table. And then, without another backward glance at the shards of broken china now littering the linoleum, she headed straight for the front door.

Bella didn't try to call Edward. It was unlikely he'd have his phone turned on and even if he did, he probably wouldn't answer when he saw her name flashing up on the screen.

No. As always with Edward, Bella relied on her instincts.

And when she reached the beach, she found that she'd been right.

Edward was sitting there alone, his back to Bella, facing out towards the river. His dark hair was messier than ever. Swiftly, without allowing herself time to lose her nerve, Bella scrambled over the sand and sat down beside Edward.

"Hi," she murmured. He continued to stare out into the river, his face not displaying any indication that he'd noticed her presence. Bella had expected this, and told herself not to be deterred.

"Look," she said quickly, her words tumbling out in a sudden rush, "I'm sorry about earlier. I'm sorry I didn't agree straight away. I was scared of leaving home. I'm only seventeen, and running away with you, when I've only known you for a couple of months, is stupid and irresponsible and more than a little bit crazy. And I've never been that girl. I've always been the sensible one; the one who had strategies and guidelines to live by so that she didn't get hurt. But somehow you just make me forget all of them."

Bella did not dare to glance at Edward to see how he was taking this, for fear that his reaction might stop her from saying all she had to say. Better to get it all out now, and then deal with the consequences later for better or worse.

"So I hesitated," she continued, "but that's not a crime, after all, and in fact it gave me time to think this all over. And I realised something. I realised that I can't stay here, Edward. Not if you leave. I can't live here without you, now that I've met you and been your friend and fallen in love with you. You're... in just a couple of months you've somehow become everything to me. You mean more than people I'm related to by blood, or have known all my life. And, I mean, how screwed up is that? It's crazy! We barely know each other... only we do, because I feel like I know you better than anyone else on the planet. I've told you things I've never been able to tell anyone, said stuff that I never imagined I could say out loud. It's like we're, I don't know, made for each other or something equally as clichéd. It just feels right."

Bella paused, still looking straight ahead. It was twilight again. It always was with them. She closed her eyes.

"Edward, you remember that night after the diner when I didn't see any dreams? It was because I was with you. When we're together, it's like you block out everything else. My world becomes you, and there's no room for anything else. You stop my power from being. And then when I'm not with you, your presence is still so great in my mind that the only dreams I see are yours. But even those are getting rarer."

Bella shook her head, aware of how this must sound.

"I know I sound insane – maybe I am – but I don't think so. It can't be a coincidence. I've been having those dreams uncontrollably for years and then I meet you and it all starts to fade. It's you; it's because of you. It's like you're fixing me, Edward. You're taking it away, you're making it better. And if that's what you can do for me, then I think... no, I know, I can do the same for you. I can help you, if you'll just let me."

A ringing silence met Bella's words. Even the wind seemed to have held its breath. And then:

"You already are."

Bella looked up for the first time and met Edward's eyes. They were no longer red. The tear tracks on his cheeks had faded or been washed away. He looked... different. Calmer. As though he had been sitting and thinking by this broken boat for a long time before she'd arrived.

"S-sorry?" she asked hesitantly, needing confirmation of what she thought she had just heard.

Edward looked down at her and his lips formed a faint half-smile.

"You're already helping me."

And then Bella realised. He hadn't come here to hide. He'd come here to wait. To wait for her.

This became even clearer as gently, carefully, Edward lent in and kissed her.

"Just so you know," he whispered against her lips, "I feel the same way. And I'm sorry for running." And he kissed her one more time. Then he broke away. Bella could see that he was still smiling.

And she knew that things weren't all suddenly better. She knew that Edward's pain and anger were far from gone. She realised that it would take a long time for her own feelings towards her mother to fade or improve. But there, in that moment with Edward by the river, none of it seemed to matter. She knew that whatever had to take place for them both to be complete would happen, as long as they were together.

And, just as this thought was registering in her mind, Bella heard herself say the two syllables that were to mark the beginning of the rest of her life.

"Let's go."

The next morning, as the sun began to climb above the horizon, a beat-up blue car pulled quietly out of Arizona and off onto the interstate. They were heading northwest. The sunlit open road stretched far ahead, the darkness left to fall quickly behind.

Contents: two runaways. Their pasts: fading. Next destination: unknown. Their future: undecided.

_The possibilities: endless._

**THE END. **


End file.
